Think Back
by musing11
Summary: With a gun to her head, Olivia Dunham thinks of before." AU/Future, dark!fic. Peter/Olivia...kind of. Some swearing and mildly adult situations. One-shot with prequel possibility.


A/N: Okay, so this is kind of AU....who am I kidding, it's really AU.

Not really sure why I wrote it at all, but I had fun doing it, so I hope you like!

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*

With a gun to her head, Olivia Dunham thinks of before.

*

There was sun in the room where we first met, warmth. The desert in the daytime is a warm place if nothing else.

Dry, too.

It's cold now, and I'm soaking wet, not to mention half-naked.

_It's the little things that really get you._

Like the pinch of the electrodes still stuck to my head.

I reach up to peel them off and then jolt back to my strange reality with the click of the safety.

Standard, government-issued, _Olivia Dunham-issued_, 9 millimeter.

Pointed right in my face.

_Invasive, really._

_*  
_

He's different now, but so am I.

A shadow of the man he once was. Sunken-in and hollow, both physically and emotionally.

_The alcoholism came back with a vengeance and you just watched him fall._

I don't feel guilty anymore (it was utterly inevitable), but I do regret it.

_Because those aren't the same thing..._

The eyes went first. He'd had such a spark to him in the early days, and it had resonated in his eyes.

_Smile like a glowing sun, and on a bad day it had had the power to right your world back on it's feet, if only for a few minutes._

The booze dulled both, slowly enough that I hadn't seen it coming, didn't notice until it was _way too late._ And then there was too much else to do, no time to fix it, and all I could do was watch.

*

Obsession came next.

_He is his father's son through and through, let there never be any doubt of that fact. _

The pattern grew larger and more intricate as the years went on and Peter Bishop stretched himself thin over all of it. When Walter was killed, the sole surviving heir to the Bishop legacy became everything he had every despised in the man.

I can still see the irony of it, even with a gun to my head.

I know, now, that the drinking was really just self-medicating; he was trying to stop the obsessive tendencies. He'd known, subconsciously, unconsciously – I don't pretend to understand how – but he'd known and he'd tried to stop it. Walter had done it better, because he'd used real drugs, but Peter'd had less time to figure it out and simply went back to the bottle of his youth.

And it had worked for a while.

All good things come to an end however, and after a few years it got harder and harder to make him come home. There, in the basement lab, as he sat and drank, he darkened and began to slip away, an echo of who he'd been in sunny Iraq.

Flash forward nine years and here we are.

_A crazy old married couple about to kill each other over work-related issues, only it's for real this time. _

The only two members of the original team still left, shoved underground and ignored by the rest of the FBI, unless we uncover something useful.

I was a joke, for a while; now they just avoid me.

*

At only thirty-nine years of age, dementia seems to be kicking in for Peter. He doesn't remember who I am sometimes, never remembers where we live, and I can only get him to work on FBI business when it's particularly odd. It took me a while but I understand that when he refuses to work on a case it's because he's figured it out just by looking at the preliminary file.

_Too easy, apparently. Can't be bothered. _

He is so smart now, so smart it used to scare me. Now, I hardly notice.

I have little tricks I use to get him to tell me what he thinks about a case; the reverse psychology he once used on Walter helps.

_Bloody photographs work, too._

Mostly he just whispers, like the old Walter did. Constant stream of incoherent mutterings. Whether it's caused by stress or genetics, I can't tell.

_And he won't let anyone but you near enough to try._

He's still too powerful, too much of an asset, an 'immeasurable resource' as Broyles had put it, for the FBI to lock him up.

I look up from the gun and try to find his eyes. He's shrouded in shadow, and I notice absently that the bulb above his head needs to be changed; he probably short-circuited the building again.

*

This, all of this, was inevitable.

I should have known.

I mean, Walter had practically prophesied that he was going to end up this way.

_Experimenting on children without knowing the full extent of the damage has a way of coming back to bite people in the ass. _

It could have been the intelligence implants gone bad, or the suppressed trauma finally reaching a breaking point.

I don't know.

If there is one thing that I have learned in my soon-to-be-finished life, it's how much I don't know.

And this is all pointless musing really, because I am asking questions that have no one left to answer them but a ghost with a gun who wouldn't, even if he could.

*

His eyes are cold and suspicious.

The man is deranged and what is shaping up to be my fatal flaw is that I trusted him.

And I still do, strangely enough.

_It's becoming rather problematic. _

I know him too well, that's the difficulty right there.

There's too much between us now, too much history, too much time spent in this dark room with no one but each other.

_It's co-dependency to the nasty, nth degree._

I sound bitter – I'm not, really. Regretful, but not bitter.

Because it's as much his fault what's happening here as it is mine.

He's the man holding the gun, sure, but he thinks I'm a threat to national security, so in a sense he _is_ in the right.

*

I should be scared right now, scared shitless I guess, but he's here, and since he's the only thing that keeps me grounded anymore, I'm more comfortable here then I am getting groceries. Even though he's about to kill me.

It's co-dependency and trust, once again, ready to tear me apart.

_Your problems begin and end with trust, it seems._

I trusted John Scott. Mistake.

I trusted Walter Bishop to get John out of my head. Mistake.

I trusted Peter...with everything I had, really – once you get down to it.

_It would seem that was a mistake, as well._

But the whole mess began with John, and he's still here, so I suppose it will have to end with him as well.

Walter had told me he would fade...

And for a while he'd been right.

John grew weaker and weaker, and on most days he was a presence that I could only feel when I wasn't looking; a _something_, just out of the corner of my eye. But then he kept me alive during the months I'd been held by ZFT for 'questioning', helped me escape eventually, and after that he was never really fiction again.

He's over by the tank now, tracing the wiring with his fingers.

Bored.

I'm about to get my face shot in and he's bored. I guess that means part of me is bored by the situation, or that I think he would've been bored by it, or that I –

I never really figured out how this whole thing works.

_You'd think after six years, but no._

The important thing is that he drove me insane, not what he's doing by the tank or the philosophy behind how we've become the same person.

_Focus._

I lose track of what I'm supposed to be doing sometimes.

_Back to the important. _

They tell me I'm sick; Broyles even tried sending me to the shrinks but Peter didn't like it and it interfered with the investigations.

Whether a therefore is required in that equation is still beyond me.

But Peter, in all his wisdom, agrees with the general diagnosis (DID of some kind, little schizophrenia thrown in for good measure), fucks me and then tells me I'm crazy. Though he says 'we', for whatever that's worth. It's a small comfort that we share insanity. Sex is one of the few things that distracts him from whatever it is he does down here, and it is only in those moments that he really sees me anymore.

There, I lost it again.

*

I believe him, of all people, which is a problem in and of itself.

John in the reason we are here now. Peter thinks he's taken over too much. He says the tests he's just run in the tank prove it. Apparently I'm partly John now, and therefore prone to double-crossing.

He tells me he doesn't mind, not really, but has decided it would be _counter-productive_ to our operation.

I believe him, which is part of the reason I'm not trying to get away.

He's right, I am a security risk, a threat to the whole project.

And although I'm not quite sure he should be my judge, jury and executioner, I close my eyes and let him.

*

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This has prequel potential, so if you're interested, review and let me know :)


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